1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to document retrieval systems, generally, and particularly, query-driven systems for the automated retrieval of electronic documents.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Document retrieval systems typically comprise document databases and the ability to determine the relevance of each document to any given query, Typically queries consist of a few words, but in principal they are themselves documents. Thus the core problem of building a document retrieval system is the task of estimating the relevance of two documents when such relevance judgments are generally subjective.
Recent approaches developed to solve this task are based on the “physical” properties of the documents (i.e., on the words they contain and how frequently they appear. See, for example, the reference to Baeza-Yates, R. and Ribeiro-Neto, B. entitled “Modern Information Retrieval”, Addison Wesley, 1999 and the reference to van Rijsbergen, C. J. entitled “Information Retrieval”, Buttersworth, 1979).
While being a desirable approach, it would be further desirable to provide a system and method for retrieving electronic (stored) documents that does not require explicit use of semantic meaning (e.g., a thesaurus).